If you thought our pronunciations were bad before, wait until you get to this chapter. It’s funky words all over the place!
This chapter opens with a poem about enlightenment. Monkey King, having literally hit rock bottom, is forced to contemplate his own mortality.
8 is a lucky number in the East, and it makes sense that it is in the 8th chapter that we get our call to adventure for the novel. In it, Buddha tells of the three collections of scriptures he’s prepared to help the people of the East and turn them away from their wickedness. And who would be better to find the mortals to make the journey to India to get them than the Boddhisattva Guanyin?
A note on Boddhisattvas: they are people who have attained enlightenment but, instead of detaching from the earthly plane altogether, swear an oath to remain and help us mortals until all can do away with suffering. Guanyin does this by acting as a bridge, opening people’s eyes to higher ways of being and consciousnesses.
Guanyin is particularly well-known in China and surrounding East Asian countries because she is a goddess of mercy, a divine feminine figure who is this culture’s analog to the Virgin Mary.
We met her a few chapters back when her disciple, Moksa aka Hui’an aka Nata’s brother, tried to intervene in heaven’s war against Sun Wukong and got trounced in one of the less interesting of heavenly battles we’ve thus seen.
Guanyin is given a cassock and staff to give to the worthy pilgrim, and off they go. I wasn’t able to find a picture of the cassock sans pilgrim, so you’ll just have to wait until the monk is found before you get to see what the heck a cassock is!
The first disciple that Guanyin meets on her journey to find the script pilgrim is also the weakest. Sha Wujing, known in the Arthur Waley translation as Sandy, looks like this:
And if you thought Sha Wujing was a real looker, then wait until you meet the next disciple, Zhou Bajie:
After meeting a dragon, and securing its pardon, Guanyin and her disciple finally come upon the Monkey King, trapped under Buddha’s mountain. Unfortunately, we don’t have very many images of the horse-dragon to share, but I’ll let you google ‘white horse’ to get good idea of what it looks like. Now that we’ve met all the would-be disciples, the stage is set for the origin story of the monk who is destined to make the perilous quest for the scriptures.
Journey on!